The Yogi
by Lady Heliotrope
Summary: Sherlock got himself a motorbike after being inspired by a Yogi in the Himalayas. Oneshot. Post-Reichenbach. Established relationship.


Three years and some months after Sherlock had leaped from the top of St. Bart's Hospital, Sherlock pulled off the motorbike helmet and gave John a standard response to the _really, why do I even ask _glare that he received from the good doctor.

"Yes. You know how seriously I take my work." With that, Sherlock moved casually across the room.

The years had been good to Sherlock in subtle and mysterious ways. When John had met him, Sherlock was a closed-off, rough-edged geode, a pocket of volcanic rock harboring an incredible beauty that was clearly _there_ but not visible. John liked to think that he'd been part of the external forces that caused Sherlock's hard exterior to give way and open, revealing its glorious crystalline striations. Now, having Sherlock back in his life, it was delightful - with every day Sherlock's exquisite interior embraced the sunshine, Sherlock grew more and more exceptionally beautiful.

These days, John didn't need to invest so much energy and time into polishing Sherlock and preventing his interior beauty from soilage. Sherlock was much more self-assured than before, in a different way - not puerile and arrogant but thoughtful, poised, and unconcerned when met with criticism.

His spirit and body had a sense of connectedness that John hadn't noticed before, evident in even how Sherlock removed his gloves and tossed them over his shoulder in the general vicinity of the coat rack. How Sherlock's svelte leather jacket of sinfully sensuous smoothness was dropped half on the table and half on John's lap, a feat of particular note because John was neither sitting on the table nor the floor but in the self-appropriated _John _armchair. How the aforementioned helmet was deposited with lingering reverence in the place that, John remembered, the skull had once taken its respite. It was the same careless Sherlock who regarded all things with existential curiosity and indifference, but his carelessness was refined and marked by an unperturbedness as opposed to repressed anger at all the world.

"I can't believe it," John said, picking the sleeve of the jacket out of his mug of tea, but proceeding to take a sip anyway, "you actually went out and got yourself a _motorbike_." John felt like he had changed only a little - whereas before such a response might have been automatic and accompanied by true shock in the context of their earlier friendship, he had an increased awareness of the nuances of his own feelings now, and he realized that he was perpetuating the old pattern out of habit, not because he was strictly surprised by Sherlock. It was just part of the language with which he communicated with Sherlock.

"Yes." Sherlock's hand, in a moment of apparent sentimentality, fiddled with the helmet's visor, toying with the hinge and flipping it open and closed. His body, ever too thin, vibrated with the movement.

John took a pensive sip of his tea, then quirked his head a little as he gave birth to a question. "So how did you get his attention, anyway? It's not as though you could just waltz in there and say, hello Mister Lance Armstrong of motorbiking, did you drive from France to Belgium and back again just to get a foreign post-stamp to mail your ex-wife the ears of her extramartial lover who you murdered?"

This was the case that had occupied Sherlock for the past day and a half, but only occupied - he'd come up with a solution immediately, and, for lack of better things to do, had obsessed about the means of extracting a confession. Mostly difficult due to the suspect's celebrity more than anything else.

Sherlock shrugged, tore himself away from his brown study of the helmet, and collapsed on the couch. "I beat him at his own game."

The question that followed was merely prolonging the inevitable. "So...you mean roulette or something, yeah?" John intuited that it probably wasn't what Sherlock had meant by the man's 'own game.' But he liked to peel away the exterior of the geode slowly, like an onion, and sometimes that meant tears. Sherlock liked to reveal things slowly, and at his own pace.

"Elementary, my dear John. I beat him in a race."

Thereupon John effected the type of face that Sherlock seemed to adore eliciting - his jaw fell. It wasn't feigned whatsoever. John was genuinely flummoxed - but then again, that was what living with Sherlock Holmes tended to achieve.

"You didn't!"

"No, not really," Sherlock said with slight regret, "I cheated. Adding a sordylcarbon hydroxy-flavinate solution to the standard composition of fuel that is used at that racetrack accelerates the already high-energy combustion process. Child's play. Though, I'll grant, if the race had been longer than fifteen minutes the engine would probably have exploded."

This further disturbed John, who clearly had many unvoiced protests but hadn't managed to get his jaw moving yet. Sherlock was a cat with a few thousand lives under his belt, that was for certain. John was torn between gratitude that Sherlock was still miraculously alive and wanting to skin the man for having had such a close encounter with death _on purpose_.

_It's as if you don't care how much I love you_, John thought, feeling a little betrayed but knowing that this was part of the territory - if you accepted being in a relationship with Sherlock Holmes, you also accepted all the stupid, idiotic, utterly brilliant things he did.

As if John never had accepted these things! At least now accepting Sherlock's manic lifestyle meant that John got some kisses (and other things) out of the arrangement. It had, in the previous iteration of their relationship, been a raw deal.

Sensing that John's thoughts were turning towards the realm of overprotective, Sherlock grabbed the day's newspaper from the table, adding with some irritation "Oh, don't fuss - I was ready to leap off any instant."

John gestured fiercely as he struggled to find words, then plunked his tea-mug on the table, and said quite definitively, "You could have been killed."

Of course this interested Sherlock a great deal as a topic of conversation; without moving his eyes from the paper, he replied, "Evidentially."

John scratched his head. "Had you ever even ridden a motorcycle before you tried this crazy stunt?"

"In India."

John frowned. "That doesn't sound like a safe place to learn how to ride a motorbike."

"Who said it was safe? We traversed the highest pass in the Himalayas before the roads were open for the spring."

John took a moment to register the implications of this.

"It was an _adventure_, John."

The doctor shook his head as he repressed his feelings of _oh how exciting that must have been_ and expressed a clear _harumph _of disapproval, but he got up, nudged Sherlock's legs up, and snuggled himself beneath the detective, wrapping his jumper-clad arms around his lover's middle.

"_Addicted_ to adventure is what you are," said John with systematic annoyance, adding, "And who was _we?_"

"A deeply respected yogi," said Sherlock quietly, and John remembered anew how long the three years break of their friendship had been.

John had not been previously told about Sherlock's encounter with a yogi.

"So, erm. Did you also learn to meditate while you were there, or just motorbike?"

Sherlock leaned back and breathed into John's ear, "Practiced, not _learnt _meditation, John."

"Okay, _practiced_..." But John tried to imagine Sherlock and his spindly, fluid self sitting in lotus, and John, while he could imagine it very clearly, hadn't ever seen Sherlock behave in such a manner. "What are you talking about - I've never seen you meditate!"

Sherlock rolled his eyes, thumped back against John's chest with a huff, and dropped the newspaper over their legs. "My _Mind Palace_, John!"

"Oh." John squinted a bit and realized that yes, that made sense. So he nuzzled his head into the crook of Sherlock's neck. "So what do they call that in yoga?"

"They don't. It's a _shamanic_ meditation practice."

"Uh-huh." That made more sense to John - and the first thing that came to his mind was that shamans were known in the medical community for using psychotropic plants such as datura to achieve their experiences. "Was...your gateway drug...something that was-"

"_No_, John. If you must know, I spent a summer on an Indian reservation in my boyhood when Mycroft was in love with a Navajo poet."

John was starting to become fatigued of giving _what? _faces.

"They met in a policy class at university and agreed that Big Government was the Best Government, albeit for different reasons. Though yes, I think that _was_ the summer I started using intravenous, but that's quite unrelated."

_Quite unrelated_, John echoed with grim humor, deciding that indeed the two things probably were _very _related. He would have probed more, but he was feeling rather tired and didn't want to get Sherlock and himself into an argument at near-bedtime, because inevitably, conversations about Sherlock's addictions devolved quickly. And they were in a comfortable place at the moment, besides.

Sherlock seemed to agree, as he sighed and closed his eyes and said, "So anyway, yes John, I do know how to ride a motorbike, and very well, thank you."

John said, "Okay," and tried to think of something else to say about the matter, but Sherlock interrupted his musings by suddenly wrenching himself out of John's arms, standing up, and throwing the newspaper on the floor.

"Would you like to go for a turn?"

John, startled, felt helpless to resist, but did for the sake of form. "It's almost midnight, Sherlock!" And they'd been _cozy..._

Taking this response as agreement, or else just not caring, Sherlock grabbed his damp-sleeved leather jacket and zipped it up. "Stop giving excuses based on the clock, John, you know they never work."

Knowing that he'd probably protest the same way if it were four in the afternoon same as if it were four in the morning, John got up with a recalcitrant _hmph! _and padded into their bedroom to get his own jacket.

"I have work tomorrow, we can't be out too late," he said as he came back, hands in his pockets.

"Understood." Sherlock was yanking on the skin-tight gloves and looking at his reflection in the mirror, poking a bit mid-yank at his hair, which was affected a little by static. "What have you got in your pocket?" he added as John approached him from behind.

"Nothing special," said John, pulling Sherlock's scarf from his jacket-pocket, carefully draping it around his lover's neck in one and a half loops, as Sherlock was wont to do himself.

"Thank you," said Sherlock, and John wondered anew how the three years had changed the detective in such subtle ways. All was the same as before, but there were little differences as gentle and mysterious as _please _and _thank you_.

And this feeling of appreciation, as it ebbed from him in a wave of happy delight as like seeing a geode sparkle in the sun, seemed to be noticed by Sherlock, too, who caught John's eye in the mirror and smiled.

They pounded down the darkened stairs two at a time, and soon were outside in the cool of the late spring evening, where Sherlock's motorbike, silver and gleaming in the serious moonlight, looked like it was smirking at them. John, with interest, approached it.

"Can two ride this thing?" he asked, and in response, Sherlock nodded, patting the seat.

"You'd be surprised." He paused. "The yogi was particularly instructive in some things aside from motorbiking, however," Sherlock said of a sudden, turning and closing the slight difference between the men, pressing his loin against John's in a way that made the good doctor almost shudder despite himself.

"And...what were these?" asked John, forcing himself to pay attention to his breath and not to the gentle, seductive touch of Sherlock's hands on his hips.

"First," Sherlock said as he dipped his head and pressed his forehead against John's, his deep voice just a decibel above unhearable, "he taught the man who thought himself fearless to accept and conquer fear.

"Second," he continued, his arms hugging the doctor closer to him, "he taught the man who thought himself loveless to accept and reciprocate love."

Whereupon Sherlock made a motion to kiss John, but seemed to change his mind halfway, and a look of humorous taunting came to his face that made John's lower member ache.

"Third, he taught the man who thought himself to be _always right _to accept _not knowing_."

Both of them were, at this point, breathing heavier than normal, and John found that he was cornered, stuck in the space between the handlebar and the body of the vehicle, trapped by Sherlock, who loomed over him with the devious, glinting humor of a devil.

"So...he took your virginity?" asked John with some perplexity, which made Sherlock take a step back and double over with laughter that resounded in the narrow street.

"You're too much," said Sherlock after recovering his composure, "No, I speak of psychology. I meant to imply that from his teaching, I first realized that you might have _consciously_ reciprocated the feelings that I'd had for you - while it was obvious you had subconscious attraction from the start, I presumed it would not press further than your subconscious. And then I also realized that even if you didn't I should still go on and tell you how I felt upon my return - because that in and of itself might bring you to a conscious acceptance of your feelings."

"Ah," said John. "So it would have been all on me, then, if you'd not gone to India."

"Perhaps." Sherlock shrugged. "My inner teacher wasn't speaking too clearly at the time - everything he said had to do with oatmeal-colored jumpers and tea and England and service revolvers and blogging."

He said this deadpan, but a grin flared up on his face like a wildfire at a moment's notice, and before John could protest they were kissing deeply.

After some moments of this intimate interfacing, they did mount the silver steed and buzz around London. Sherlock had named the motorbike "The Boss" after some book he (with a blush) admitted reading about knights riding bicycles, and if John recognized the Mark Twain, he didn't say so.

John was too engaged to tease Sherlock about his reading of American fantasy fiction. He was too full of overwhelming delight, of exceptional pleasure, and of deep appreciation and honor at having been allowed a few more little glimpses inside the crystalline geode that was the private inner life of an evolving Sherlock Holmes.

* * *

If you want to watch a movie about an Indian yogi leading a motorcycle trip across the Himalayas...check out The Highest Pass which comes out this weekend (April 27) in Santa Monica and Pasadena, CA. I had the honor of screening it and meeting the composer and the producer a month ago.

Written for an LJ prompt - "I read that Benedict Cumberbatch rides a motorbike. I would love to read a story where after the fall, Sherlock keeps an eye on John while riding a motorbike round London,because the helmet and leathers provide an excellent disguise. Slash would be good, but I'll take gen! :) JJ" And as usual I kinda messed up because I read the prompt once, started writing, and forgot about what the focus was necessarily supposed to be for the plot. But seriously - I have fantasies about catching a glimpse of B.C. on his motorbike in the midst LA traffic. So a motorbike story was inevitable.


End file.
